I've searched extensively in this forum and found no mention of a similar problem, so here goes: I have written a little Python script to randomly rotate my wallpaper (since GNOME 3 removed that ability). My first approach to it was quite silly, since I had put it running in a loop and of course that required a lot of CPU time.

Then I started looking at cron. I set up a simple call to the script (which is in my user home) every 2 minutes. Trouble is, I can see that crond effectively called it (I've been watching /var/log/cron for some time) but does not run it. (and yes, the script does run when I call it manually! )

I've tried putting it in the system's crontab (/etc/crontab) and the user's one, I've also tried to make root run the script instead of me (in case my user account is not authorised to run cronjobs...), and I even tried to disable SELinux to see if that help (it didn't).

Can you please give me a hand with this? Oh, and my machine is running the 64-bit version of Fedora 16. (no rawhide, just standard updates, I want to keep it as stable as possible...)

It all depends on who is logged in. If you are the only user then that will work.... some times - If you are not logged in you get errors. If someone else is logged in (or you as someone else) more errors.

It all depends on who is logged in. If you are the only user then that will work.... some times - If you are not logged in you get errors. If someone else is logged in (or you as someone else) more errors.

OK, thanks for the tip! But since this is my personal computer in which I am the sole user (and I don't intend to run a graphical session as root) I think I won't run into further problems...

Regarding marko's post (I thought I had replied but the post is not here, something failed... :P) - I had initially set the script to do the timing by itself (every 45 minutes or so it would then run the function to rotate the wallpaper) but since I didn't know about the timer.sleep() function I did what every newbie would do: while True and everything inside the loop! (which is good if you're programming a microcontroller which will only do that little piece of code, but it is *not* OK for a daemon which we want to have the minimum possible impact on the system! :P)

Which was the main reason I switched to a cron-based solution and left the timing chores to the OS - a more clever solution, if you ask me!

I think there are already gnome plugins and KDE plasma widgets that will do wallpaper rotation for you. That might be a good thing to look into also

Hmmm, I checked the main gnome extensions website and found nothing on that... and I'm not that huge fan of KDE, so I wouldn't go that way either (KDE _does_ have multiple image support for the wallpaper built-in, I think...).